The post Puppet show appeared first on J.J. McCullough.
]]>http://www.jjmccullough.com/index.php/2016/02/07/puppet-show/feed/16The new prime minister of Canadahttp://www.jjmccullough.com/index.php/2015/10/21/the-new-prime-minister-of-canada-2/
http://www.jjmccullough.com/index.php/2015/10/21/the-new-prime-minister-of-canada-2/#commentsWed, 21 Oct 2015 07:03:10 +0000http://www.jjmccullough.com/?p=8584

The post The new prime minister of Canada appeared first on J.J. McCullough.
]]>http://www.jjmccullough.com/index.php/2015/10/21/the-new-prime-minister-of-canada-2/feed/12The wrong side of Hillaryhttp://www.jjmccullough.com/index.php/2015/08/01/the-wrong-side-of-hillary/
http://www.jjmccullough.com/index.php/2015/08/01/the-wrong-side-of-hillary/#commentsSun, 02 Aug 2015 05:14:24 +0000http://www.jjmccullough.com/?p=8511

Bad things tend to happen to those who oppose the Clintons. It’s now known that many of the vilest slurs hurled against Barack Obama during his first presidential run — including crazed allegations he was born in Kenya or a closet Muslim who secretly wore weird Muslim clothes — had their origins in the Hillary 2008 campaign. Neither Senator Clinton nor her immediate proxies cast such […]

It’s now known that many of the vilest slurs hurled against Barack Obama during his first presidential run — including crazed allegations he was born in Kenya or a closet Muslim who secretly wore weird Muslim clothes — had their origins in the Hillary 2008 campaign. Neither Senator Clinton nor her immediate proxies cast such aspersions directly, of course — that would be unbecoming of a leader of such imperious airs. No, the rumors began, as rumors often do, via the chain letters, blog comments, and idle gossip of free-agent “supporters,” who were just innocuously repeating second-hand truths as they understood them. The technique was what political scientists call the “whisper campaign;” nasty underground innuendo against a candidate that mysteriously emerges at precisely the time her opponent needs it most.

Today Senator Bernard Sanders of Vermont, who promises to bring Scandinavian-style “democratic socialism” to America, seeks to replay the role of 2008 Obama and offer a more aggressively “left” alternative to Hillary Clinton, reputed centrist. But leftism is a vast bundle of priorities, and few politicians can effectively embody them all. Because Sanders’ focus has always been primarily economic — his crowd-pleasing speeches mostly center around corporate greed and income inequality — he’s left himself vulnerable on the front becoming steadily more dominant in America’s left-wing conversation — social justice and identity group sensitivity.

On July 18 Senator Sanders was interrupted during a speech by self-appointed representatives of the Black Lives Matter set, and his irritated, slightly befuddled reaction — which included tone-deaf bragging about spending “50 years of my life fighting for civil rights and dignity” — exposedunfamiliarity with the rituals of humble privilege-checking now expected of white progressives. Columns in progressiveoutlets werewritten about his campaign’s “race problem,” and memes began to sprout about his suspiciously “all-white” audiences and supporters. And didn’t he come from Vermont, the whitest state in the country?

Similar suspicions have been conspicuously whipped up over Sander’s supposed closet life as a “gun nut,” in the words of one Slate columnist, a reputation that helps solidify his caricature as a hickish creature from the backwoods of lily-white New England. Sanders, of course, can barely even be called a gun moderate by any standard beyond the far left’s; there are numerous rural-state Democrats to his right on this issue, and he’s received a D- from the NRA and an F from Gun Owners of America for consistently backing the vast majority of firearm control bills brought before Congress. Yet what Sanders calls the “mythology” of his Second Amendment record has managed to become a settled piece of online conventional wisdom just the same.

Other slurs have been darker still. Mother Jones somehow stumbled across a cringeworthy 43-year old essay Sanders wrote in his hippie days in which he mused about what he assumed were typical female sexual fantasies (“being raped by 3 men simultaneously”) in order to make some dated and obscure point about gender relations. This, said his enemies, was proof the old geezer was on the wrong side of “Rape Culture.” Then there was the truly bizarre rumor that the Jewish senator was some manner of secret Israeli double-agent, an allegation infamously floutedon NPR by a host who claimed to just be repeating something she’d heard online.

Hillary has reason to fear Sanders; initially assumed to be little more than a Kucinich-like fringe figure providing token opposition to her coronation, his poll numbers have now risen to the point where victories in a couple of early primary states seem plausible, if not likely. As Clinton’s press becomes near-uniformly negative thanks to ongoing troubles with her ominouslymissing emails, which beg questions of credibility on everything from the business ethics of her family’s charity to Benghazi to who is or isn’t in her inner court of advisors, the case for a “cleaner” Democratic candidate in 2016 gets ever stronger.

What Bernie (and for that matter, O’Malley, Chaffee, or Biden) will never have, however, is an appeal that can be couched in the trendynarratives of identity group victimization and triumph. Hillary’s importance as a glass-ceiling breaker must never be forgotten, and if that requires a nasty underground campaignpushing slanderous stereotypes of of her white male opponents, so be it.

Everything we think we know about Donald Trump’s presidential campaign flows from a single word: “rapists.” In making his infamous off-the-cuff remarks (not that he makes any other kind) at his campaign kick-off that the Mexicans “are bringing drugs and they are bringing crime and their rapists” into the United States, Trump offered a political […]

Everything we think we know about Donald Trump’s presidential campaign flows from a single word: “rapists.”

In making his infamous off-the-cuff remarks (not that he makes any other kind) at his campaign kick-off that the Mexicans “are bringing drugs and they are bringing crime and their rapists” into the United States, Trump offered a political Rorschach test that has been chronically misinterpreted ever since. Like so much about Trump, there is significantly less here than meets the eye.

Was it a racist comment? On this, social justice warriors, the Republican establishment, and white nationalists all seem to agree, which should perhaps indicate his remarks were a tad lacking in clarity.

Was Trump implying all Mexicans are rapists — or at the very least, significantly more likely to be? That’s a interpretation that satisfies many, be they liberals desperate to believe the Republican base is a gaggle of bigots, backers of primary rivals desperate to dismiss Trump as unhinged, or genuine racists desperate to have one of their own on the center stage.

Or perhaps Trump was merely expressing deep reservations of immigration in general?

Ann Coulter, who coincidentally has an anti-immigration book out right now, has been promoting this theory of Trump quite strenuously, and it’s certainly a valid explanation for his current bump in the polls. Immigration is a great deal less popular in the United States than is fashionable to acknowledge, with large reason for the distaste being an assumed correlation between immigration and criminality.

Trump, for his part, has sought to clarify. “We’re talking about illegal immigration, and everyone understands that,” he barked at a Telemundo reporter the other day. “That’s a typical case of the press with misinterpretation.”

In other recent interviews, Trump has thrown his support behind increasing immigration overall — so long as the immigrants come legally — and has more or less taken it for granted that there should be some “path to citizenship” for non-felonious illegals already here (“I’m going to formulate a plan I think people will be happy with”). Other Trump critics on the right have dug up fairly recent examples of Trump spouting deeply establishmentarian immigration talking-points, including a 2012 interview with NewsMax in which he uses words like “mean-spirited” and “maniacal” to describe Governor Romney’s immigration rhetoric.

His prescriptions for America’s leaky southern border, meanwhile, have been preposterous —“I would do something very severe unless [Mexico] contributed or gave us the money to build the wall,” he told CNN, helpfully adding “I’m very good at building things.” (In Trump’s version of the world there are very few problems that can’t be solved with bullying.) Genuine racists may be similarly discouraged to hear Trump’s endless damage-control assertions of how much he “loves” the Latino people and braggy confidence that he’ll “win the Hispinic [sic] vote.”

At present, Donald Trump’s image seems to have congealed at “Fifth Horsemen of the Apocalypse,” a characterization deserving of suspicion given the vast ideological diversity of people who share it. Everyone presumes that beneath that hair and that bravado there must be an inner core that is either supremely vile or supremely heroic. His wealth, fame, and fearlessness is assumed to liberate him from the self-censorship and political correctness of other Republicans, exposing a creature of pure right-wing id.

Tragically discarded is our conventional understanding of celebrities who “get political” late in life — they know a great deal less than they think. Those who have lived most of their adulthood knowing only privilege and power are less likely to have had the sort of diverse life experiences and interactions necessary to breed sophisticated political opinions; they are less likely to be pressured by life’s complexities to formulate viable solutions to properly understood problems. They are, in short, likely to be buffoons.

Trump’s talent has been the conversion of his buffoonery into the persona of a populist demagogue, the sort of politician upon whom voters project beliefs he has never specifically articulated, but we assume a man like him would hold. In that sense, he is nothing revolutionary or unprecedented, but a stock character of American presidential politics that runs in continuum from William Jennings Bryan to Huey Long to Jesse Jackson and Pat Robertson to Ross Perot and even the current president.

When it comes to reforming our decrepit political institutions, many Canadians are desperate enough to endorse any proposal slid under their nose. As usual, it pays to read the fine print. Justin Trudeau is getting a lot of good press at the moment for a booklet of “fair and open government” proposals he released last week, […]

When it comes to reforming our decrepit political institutions, many Canadians are desperate enough to endorse any proposal slid under their nose. As usual, it pays to read the fine print.

Justin Trudeau is getting a lot of good press at the moment for a booklet of “fair and open government” proposals he released last week, as part of a slow rollout of his 2015 election platform. The 30 initiatives tackle a variety of different realms, all clearly calculated to salve specific anxieties about the supposed authoritarianism of the Harper government. As useful repairs to what we used to call Canada’s “democratic deficit,” however, most are worse than flawed — they’re actively destructive.

The most glaring sin is hypocrisy, in the form of a backwards-forwards attempt to institute a more competent, meritocratic governing class while not sacrificing any tenants of liberalism along the way.

“Stephen Harper’s Conservatives have allowed ideology to trump common sense, good policy, and evidence about what works,” asserts the introduction to a chapter labeled “Evidence-based policy.”

“A Liberal government will ensure the federal government rebuilds its capacity to deliver on evidence-based decision-making.”

Fine, whatever. But a few pages later, we are told with equal fervor that “A Liberal Cabinet will have an equal number of women and men” and the federal bureaucracy will be rigged to ensure “more Indigenous Peoples and minority groups are reflected in positions of leadership.”

It’s in this context that Trudeau promises to place his thumb even harder on the scale, and push an already rigged system towards even stricter quotas. Since it’s not just the Conservative Party who find women generally unrepresented in their parliamentary caucus (only ten of the Liberals 36 MPs are female), such a promise would almost certainly sacrifice executive branch competence at the alter of identity politics.

Things get even worse when it comes to the Supreme Court, where Trudeau says all future appointments must be “functionally bilingual.”

Like everywhere else in the Canadian public sector, bilingualism is already a criteria considered when prime ministers evaluate Supreme Court judges, and by law, three of the nine must be from Quebec, which unto itself guarantees the court a bilingual faction considerably larger than the 17% of the Canadian public who claim fluency in French and English. I’ve written extensively about Canada’s enormously anti-democratic cult of bilingualism, and the collision course it runs with inclusive, representative government. Precisely how Trudeau expects a lawyer in an English-speaking province to complete law school, serve a substantial career on the bench, and learn all his profession’s terms and jargon in a foreign language is an mystery his sheltered Ottawaified mind has not shown signs of being able to comprehend.

This progressive paradox of demanding fixed answers within a supposedly “more open” political system appears in numerous other corners of Trudeau’s package of promises.

He promises more “free votes” in Parliament, yet qualifies that they cannot be on questions that involve “significant budgetary measures,” campaign promises, or anything Trudeau deems contrary to the “shared values embodied in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.”

An earlier promise that future Liberal Senators would be selected by an expert panel is downgraded into said panel merely helping “advise” the prime minister.

A vague promise is made to ensure “2015 will be the last federal election conducted under the first-past-the-post voting system” though changing the way Canadians vote will not be subject to a national referendum, unlike everypriorproposal of the sort. As Kelly McParland noted in the National Post, should the Liberal leader be elected prime minister, “the system Trudeau wants to dump would be the basis of his power to impose a new one of his choice.”

That there are problems with Canada’s present political system does not make it axiomatic that every proposed reform is an objective improvement. Since fashionable progressives like Trudeau view government as a tool whose worth is measured by its ability to generate specific outcomes, they are not the sorts of people from whom we should expect meaningful change over how these outcomes are decided.

Gilles Duceppe, the longtime boss of the separatist Bloc Quebecois who resigned in 2011 following a landslide defeat for his party in that year’s federal election, emerged from the grave this week to reclaim his old job. In a surprise overnight coup, the party announced Wednesday morning that the obscure and unknown Mario Beaulieu, who had […]

Gilles Duceppe, the longtime boss of the separatist Bloc Quebecois who resigned in 2011 following a landslide defeat for his party in that year’s federal election, emerged from the grave this week to reclaim his old job. In a surprise overnight coup, the party announced Wednesday morning that the obscure and unknown Mario Beaulieu, who had been elected Bloc leader almost exactly a year ago, would be stepping down immediately so the old boss could be installed in his place. Duceppe had opposed Beaulieu’s election in 2014, openly mocking his hardline rhetoric (which included spouting slogans from the 60s-era French-Canadian terrorist group the Front de Liberation du Quebec) as vulgar and unelectable.

Duceppe’s return to head a party he led for over 14 years represents a great many things. Most notably, it concludes an era of chronic instability in the post-2011 Bloc, which has seen an astonishing five leaders in as many years, thanks to persistent difficulty in scraping up a capable successor to Duceppe.

Having shrunk from 49 seats to four in 2011, the party proceeded to lose three more members in the years that followed — one via purge, two through defection. They’d be down to a single MP if not for Claude Patry, an NDP legislator who defected into the Bloc in 2013, thereby capping their net loss at two.

Ignored by the press and stagnant in the polls, these desperate times called for desperate measures. Duceppe may have led the party to its worst-ever defeat, but in 2004 he also led it to its best-ever showing (or at least a showing tied for best-ever), which was certainly more than could be said of the never-elected-to-anything Monsieur Beaulieu.

On the other hand, in reviving a leader who contested six of the seven elections of the party’s lifetime, the Bloc now looks more than ever like a personality-cult, a sort of more successful version of Elizabeth May’s Green Party in which a gaggle of disparate interests are held together by the sheer magnetism of a compelling personality. Duceppe is fast approaching 70 and even leaders-for-life can’t dodge expiration dates forever. If the Bloc’s greatest existential weakness is its lack of a succession plan, it’s hard to see Duceppe’s return as anything but a rescheduled judgment day.

It’s premature to say how much of a wrench Duceppe 3.0 will be in the delicate machinery of Canada’s other parties, but early reports suggest Thomas Mulcair’s NDP has the most to lose.

For the last few weeks Canada’s papers have been filled with breathless coverage of a narrow NDP lead in the national polls, a lead that is, at least in part, heavily dependent on an enormous, 20-point lead in the province of Quebec.

The NDP’s near-sweep of that province in 2011 was unprecedented and unexpected, and barring a follow-up election for context, most political observers still struggle to describe exactly what it meant.

In abandoning the Bloc, did Quebec’s NDP voters express a sort of born-again loyalty to Ottawa?

Were they genuinely interested in making the NDP’s anti-separatist boss prime minister of Canada? Or were they merely electing a slew of largely unknown and inexperienced NDP MPs to express a fresh flavor of French-Canadian disregard for the understood purpose of federal politics?

Or perhaps it was something more utilitarian in its parochialism? Was the NDP, the only party in 2011 other than the Bloc with a Quebec-born leader, simply deemed the most trustworthy steward of Quebec interests in Ottawa?

If the latter is true, then Mulcair may have much to fear from the return of a Bloc leader who vows to be “the voice of a party that is Quebec first, Quebec all the time!” (his emphasis). Duceppe certainly poses little threat to Prime Minister Harper’s Conservatives, who have now more or less stopped seeking votes in the left-wing province in favor of doubling-down on a centre-right agenda of lowering taxes and jailing criminals that’s proven to play well in Anglo Canada.

Justin Trudeau’s Liberals, meanwhile, have cause for optimism at the sight of Mulcair’s NDP and a reinvigorated Bloc competing for a shared base of alienated, self-centered Francophones. Ranked third choice in the province, a vote split among anti-establishment, uber-nationalist progressives could produce more than a few come-from-the-middle wins for a party that’s neither. No Liberal prime minister has ever been elected without a strong Quebec delegation, but this strength can be supplementary so long as enough seats are won elsewhere.

Canada’s majority looks on as an exotic minority decides its priorities. As usual, their answer could be decisive.

There is a certain naiveté inherent in believing dysfunctional foreign nations can be made viable simply through outside military intervention. This was obviously the great lesson of the second Bush administration and the war to remove Saddam Hussein: Iraq was a blood-soaked basket-case under Saddam, yet in hindsight it seems his dictatorship was as much […]

There is a certain naiveté inherent in believing dysfunctional foreign nations can be made viable simply through outside military intervention. This was obviously the great lesson of the second Bush administration and the war to remove Saddam Hussein: Iraq was a blood-soaked basket-case under Saddam, yet in hindsight it seems his dictatorship was as much a product of this unlovely status quo as its cause. America’s empathetic rhetoric of liberation proved too generous by half, presuming, as it did, that the violent, petty sectarianism that characterized Saddam’s regime lacked the popular support we’ve since learned it has.

Yet the aftermath of America’s 2003–2011 war has encouraged the rise of another sort of thoughtlessness — the sample-size-of-one generalization that since Iraq went poorly, US military interventions in foreign nations always “cause more problems than they solve,” and should be ipso facto avoided as a result. Such knee-jerkism has been in predictable abundance in the aftermath of President Obama’s decision to bomb select Iraqi targets in response to the growing power of the fundamentalist terror group ISIS.

Ron Paul released a tendentious editorial last week denouncing the Obama strikes as but the latest manifestation of a “failed interventionist policy” in Iraq, in which human suffering is “cynically manipulated by the Obama administration … to provide a reason for the president to attack Iraq again.” Rand the Younger, for his part, warned that opposing ISIS could bring America into closer alliance with decided undesirables. “Do you know who also hates ISIS and who is bombing them?” he asked rhetorically the other day, “Assad, the Syrian government.”

On the left, meanwhile, some Congressional Democrats have been equally eager to draw continuity between the eight-year Bush war and Obama’s potentially “open-ended” raids. Even MoveOn.org’s put aside their usual dogmatic partisanship to issue a stern reprimand that Iraq’s current problems are not ones “that more U.S. bombings can solve.”

There are concerns to be raised about the Obama plan, to be sure. This month marks the 50th anniversary of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, and Americans are right to be wary of the unforeseen consequences of ill-conceived military adventurism. Yet if this latest Middle East intervention is to be skeptically considered in any useful way, critiques should begin by confronting its terms of engagement as articulated by the president himself, as opposed to some totemic notion of what we might cynically expect them to be.

On August 7, President Obama defined his ambitions for military action against ISIS as fundamentally limited, and based around two narrow goals: safeguarding the thousands of American personnel still serving in various official capacities in the cities of Erbil and Baghdad, and protecting various Iraqi religious minorities hiding on Mt. Sinjar from “a potential act of genocide” at the hands of surrounding ISIS fighters.

To date, all bombing raids — nearly 100 now, or about 20 a day — have made good on this promise.

Mandate number two, the protection of American personal, has proven no less focused, even if the precise subject of that focus — providing air support to help Iraqi and Kurdish forces recapture control of the Mosul Dam from ISIS militants — was somewhat unanticipated. Though critics have cried mission creep, the interest in making protection of the dam the primary focus of American safety seems evident enough: destroying the Dam could flood Baghdad within hours, and presumably the safety of the countless US contractors, diplomats, and elite forces stationed there would not be well served by a “15-foot wall of water” crashing into their homes and offices.

Amid the backdrop of these missions, the President has repeated a consistent, self-aware refrain that no, this is not an open-ended war, yes, it is primarily the Iraqis’ responsibility to defend themselves, and yes, he is keenly aware of — and eager to avoid — the irony of being a president who ended one war in Iraq only to start another.

America’s current battle is not about regime change or nation-building, nor is it one that threatens to instigate the emergence of “something worse” by failing to appreciate the stability of the status quo. ISIS literally crucifies heretics, buries children alive, and decapitates journalists with rusty razors. They are quite objectively, as Charles Krauthammer put it, the “worst people on Earth,” yet the current US mission is simply trying to restrain the impact of their evil, rather than extinguish it altogether. Considering how much responsibility Obama bears for the rise of ISIS to begin with — through his blindly political Iraqi troop withdrawal and refusal to back Syria’s moderate rebels when it could have made a difference — it seems the man has earned the benefit of the doubt when he says he’s not serious about using American might to solve big problems.

To dust off cliched complaints about American imperialism in this context is not only to lazily slur a military intervention that is at least trying to be the opposite of Bushism — restrained and humble— but to profess moral apprehension about even the clearest-cut applications of military force to defend American safety and prevent humanitarian disaster from villains of truly unimpeachable evil.

I recently finished reading Jeff Toobin’s A Vast Conspiracy, an epic 448-page chronicle of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, from its earliest beginnings as an obscure sexual harassment lawsuit in Arkansas to the second-ever impeachment of an American president. My interest was sparked by Monica’s recent and very thoughtful essay in Vanity Fair, which brought her […]

I recently finished reading Jeff Toobin’s A Vast Conspiracy, an epic 448-page chronicle of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, from its earliest beginnings as an obscure sexual harassment lawsuit in Arkansas to the second-ever impeachment of an American president. My interest was sparked by Monica’s recent and very thoughtful essay in Vanity Fair, which brought her decades-old story back into public conversation. The tale’s only become more timely since, now that talk of presidential impeachment (spurious or not) has reentered the headlines.

It seems the minute a president enters his second term partisan foes begin to chatter about whether he’s impeach-worthy. It’s a sentiment born partially from frustrated resentment (no one likes to lose twice to the same guy), partially from opportunism (the Congressional opposition almost always gains seats during a president’s first term), and partially from the White House itself, for whom rallying against an “impeachment obsessed” opposition can be of great material benefit.

So present rumblings over the possible impeachment of President Obama will probably only get louder in coming months. What lessons can today’s giddy Republicans learn from their predecessors’ failure?

First: have a clear-cut, impeachable offense.

It was never entirely clear why Clinton was being impeached, which allowed accusations it was “all about politics” or “all about sex” to fill the ambiguity.

Republicans furiously believed the Clinton White House was hopelessly corrupt, and Clinton himself embarrassing and immoral, yet they ultimately chose to impeach him for two incredibly narrow, legal offenses: lying to a grand jury about his affair with Monica during his deposition in the Paula Jones harassment suit, and obstructing justice by conspiring with Monica in various ways to ensure her corroborating silence.

Constitutional scholars generally agree that presidents can be impeached for just about anything, with the constitution’s vague criteria of “high crimes and misdemeanors” defined through centuries of English precedent to mean, in the famously glib words of Gerald Ford, “whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be.” Yet Toobin argues the 1990s heralded an era in which the judicial system “took over the political system” and it became received wisdom that political battles should be fought through lawsuits and litigation rather than traditional constitutional mechanisms. Republicans thus decided to impeach Clinton on the grounds he was a petty criminal, as opposed to simply unfit for office.

Second: have the numbers.

In contrast to the impeachment of Richard Nixon, which enjoyed some semblance of bipartisan support, every Congressional vote in the long slog to remove Bill Clinton was almost perfectly party-line.

This rank partisanship doomed Clinton’s impeachment from the get-go. Since the final vote in the process — the one that actually expels the president from office — requires a two-thirds majority in the Senate, even the GOP’s healthy majority in both chambers was not sufficient. Some Democrats had to get on board, but because Clinton’s impeachment was perceived as a hysterically ideological Republican plot (a “vast conspiracy,” if you will), none ever did. This was a direct byproduct of problem number one; because the formal argument for impeachment was confused and weak, it remained powerfully unpersuasive to the other side.

Third: have public support.

Perhaps the most famous factoid of the Clinton impeachment is that the President’s approval numbers actually went up during it. Such sympathy appears even more justified in retrospect; the “peace and prosperity” of the 90s remains enviable, and Clinton’s competence as a administrator, whatever his faults as a man, contrasts sharply with his successors.

Had the Republicans upheld the Founders’ intent, and sought to remove Clinton on the subjective, but entirely legitimate grounds that he was too crooked, unethical, and undignified to be president — as embodied not just by the Monica affair, but Whitewater, Travelgate, the Lincoln Bedroom and whatever else — it’s possible their crusade would have seemed a tad more reasonable. But it would have still failed anyway, simply because the American public did not share this conclusion, and Congress knew it.

President Obama is vastly less popular than Clinton, with large percentages believing he’s behaved improperly in a number of high-profile situations. Yet support for impeaching him sits at a dismal 33%, with estimates suggesting backers are around 90% Republican. And of course even in their best-case 2015 scenario, no one thinks the GOP will be holding two-thirds of the Senate any time soon.

The lasting legacy of the Clinton impeachment was the delegitimization of impeachment in general, and to the extent the episode was a gigantic waste of time perhaps that’s fair. Yet at its core, impeachment is simply a constitutional device for removing an unacceptable ruler, so it’s hard to argue the democratic interest is well-served by perpetuating this cultural stigma.

Even if the answer is no, it remains a proposition worth occasionally proposing.